Enigma Read Free

as he poured the drinks. He was in his fifties, a bachelor, married to the college. His books were arranged prominently on the shelf behind him. The Greek and Macedonian Art of War. Caesar as Man of Letters. Thucydides and His History.
    'Only German.' Jericho had learned it in adolescence to read the great nineteenth-century mathematicians—Gauss, Kummer, Hilbert.
    Atwood had nodded and handed over a tiny measure of very dry sherry in a crystal glass. He followed Jericho's gaze to the books. 'Do you know Herodotus, by any chance? Do you know the story of Histiaeus?'
    It was a rhetorical question; Atwood's questions mostly were.
    'Histiaeus wished to send a message from the Persian court to his son-in-law, the tyrant Aristagoras, at Miletus, urging him to rise in revolt. However, he feared any such communication would he intercepted. His solution was to shave the head of his most trusted slave, tattoo the message onto his naked scalp, wait for his hair to grow, then send him to Aristagoras with a request that he be given a haircut. Unreliable but, in his case, effective. Your health.'
    Jericho learned later that Atwood told the same stories to all his recruits. Histiaeus and his bald slave gave way to Polybius and his cipher square, then came Caesar's letter to Cicero using an alphabet in which a was enciphered as d, b as e, c as f, and so forth. Finally, still circling the subject, but closer now, had come the lesson in etymology.
    'The Latin crypta, from the Greek root kpvTTpt? meaning “hidden, concealed”. Hence crypt, burial place of the dead, and crypto, secret. Crypto-communist, crypto-fascist ... By the way, you're not either, are you?'
    'I'm not a burial place of the dead, no.'
    ' Cryptogram.. .' Atwood had raised his sherry to the light and squinted at the pale liquid. 'Cryptanalysis. . .Turing tells me he thinks you might be rather good . . .'
    Jericho was running a fever by the time he reached his rooms. He locked the door and flopped face down on his unmade bed, still wearing his coat and scarf. Presently he heard footsteps and someone knocked.
    'Breakfast, sir.'
    'Just leave it outside. Thank you.'
    'Are you all right, sir?'
    'I'm fine.'
    He heard the clatter of the tray being set down, and steps retreating. The room seemed to be lurching and swelling out of all proportion, a corner of the ceiling was suddenly huge and close enough to touch. He closed his eyes and the visions came up at him through the darkness -
    —Turing, smiling his shy half smile: 'Tom, I can assure you, I am making no progress on Riemann whatsoever . . .'
    —Logie, pumping his hand in the Bombe Hut, shouting above the noise of the machinery, 'The Prime Minister has just been on the telephone with his congratulations ..."
    —Claire, touching his cheek, whispering, 'Poor you, I've really got under your skin, haven't I, poor you . . .'
    —'Stand back'—a man's voice, Logie's voice—'Stand back, give him air . . .'
    And then there was nothing.
    When he woke, the first thing he did was look at his watch. He'd been unconscious for about an hour. He sat up and patted his overcoat pockets. Somewhere he had a notebook in which he recorded the duration of each attack, and the symptoms. It was a distressingly long list. He found instead the three envelopes.
    He laid them out on the bed and considered them for a while. Then he opened two of them. One was a card from his mother, the other from his aunt, both wishing a happy birthday. Neither woman had any idea what he was doing and both, he knew, were guiltily disappointed he wasn't in uniform and being shot at, like the sons of most of their friends.
    'But what do I tell people?' his mother had asked him in despair during one of his brief visits home, after he had refused yet again to tell her what he did.
    'Tell them I'm in government communications,' he had replied, using the formula they had been instructed to deploy in the face of persistent enquiries.
    'But perhaps they'd like to know a